Black script lettering of a four-line quote tattooed along the side of a ribcage, on skin partly covered by a red top.

Script quote tattoo on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A four-line quote in cursive script runs diagonally across the side of the ribs, with the lines stepping down from left to right. The letters are drawn in thin, even black linework with light shading, and the skin tone is warm beige. The red top at the upper edge of the frame contrasts with the tattoo, which fills the centre of the composition.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had chalked the lines for an hour before Mr Orrell came out from the bakery, wiping flour from his hands onto his apron. The fire had taken the fascia in March and left the oak split and black at the corners. "Plain letters," he said. "No gold leaf. Ruth wants it in the hand she uses on the Sunday cards."

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Her master had sent her because he said a girl's wrist was steadier than a man's after the pub had closed. The words were written on the back of a bread bill in Ruth's rounded pencil: The scars that we bear serve not as a sign of disfigurement, but a reminder of the pain we had to overcome. Ada asked who had written them. Mr Orrell said his wife had cut them from a newspaper the week after the fire and pinned them above the ovens, where she could read them while the bread proved.

So Ada set the lines stepping down the glass, each one a little shorter than the one above, and loaded her quill with black enamel. The first downstroke on the capital T went cleanly. The loops of the h and the d needed more care, and she worked slowly, breathing out between letters so the paint would not bead. By noon the sun came through the new pane and lay across the pavement, and the letters threw thin shadows onto the flour sacks inside.

Mr Orrell stood a long time reading. Then he said the old sign had been gilt, that he had always thought it lovely, and that he was glad it was gone. Ada nodded and capped her pot. She had left one thing for herself: a hairline of the old oak showing through the swoop of the final overcome, scorched brown beneath the black, where nobody would notice unless they had been there.